Contribute to OpenSource

You don't need to be a software developer to contribute to Apache Airavata. To be successful this project requires a huge range of different skills, levels of involvement and degrees of technical expertise. So, if you want to get involved in Apache Airavata, there is almost certainly a role for you.

Ways to Contribute

We are looking for people to:

  1. provide feedback
  2. write or update documentation
  3. help new users
  4. recommend the project to others
  5. test the code and report bugs
  6. fix bugs and submit patches
  7. give us feedback on required features
  8. write and update the software
  9. create artwork
  10. translate to different languages
  11. anything you can see that needs doing

Mailing Lists

Your first engagement with the project should be to subscribe to our mailing lists.

Decision Making

The most important thing about engaging with any Apache project is that everyone is equal. All people with an opinion are entitled to express that opinion and, where appropriate, have it considered by the community.

To some the idea of having to establish consensus in a large and distributed team sounds inefficient and frustrating. Don't despair though, The Apache Way has a set of simple processes to ensure things proceed at a good pace.

In ASF projects we don't like to vote. We reserve that for the few things that need official approval for legal or process reasons (e.g. a release or a new committer). Most of the time we work with the consensus building techniques documented below.

Lazy Consensus

Lazy consensus is the first, and possibly the most important, consensus building tool we have. Essentially lazy consensus means that you don't need to get explicit approval to proceed, but you need to be prepared to listen if someone objects.

Consensus Building

Sometimes lazy consensus is not appropriate. In such cases it is necessary to make a proposal to the mailing list and discuss options. There are mechanisms for quickly showing your support or otherwise for a proposal and building consensus amongst the community.

Once there is a consensus people can proceed with the work under the lazy consensus model.

Voting

Occasionally a "feel" for consensus is not enough. Sometimes we need to have a measurable consensus. For example, when voting in new committers or to approve a release.

How to contribute

Apache Airavata Contribution Guide

Welcome and thank you for your interest in contributing to Apache Airavata! This guide will take you through the process of making contributions to the airavata code base.

Engage with the community

Identify an issue or documentation that you want to fix or improve. Search JIRA and the mailing list to see if it’s already been discussed.

Create an issue in JIRA

If it’s a bug or a feature request, open a JIRA issue. Create a sample that you can use for prototyping the feature or demonstrating the bug. If creating a sample is time consuming, write steps to reproduce the issue. Attach this sample to the JIRA issue if it’s representing a bug report.

Create a pull request in GitHub

Checkout the source code. Create a pull request (PR) in GitHub for the change you're interested in making. The comment section of the PR must contain a link to the JIRA issue. Please also reference the issue in the commit message, and make sure it properly describes the changes that have been made and their purpose.

Some good references for working with GitHub are below. We ask that you keep your change rebased to master as much as possible, and we will ask you to rebase again if master has moved before accepting your patch.

Comment the issue in JIRA

Finally, add a comment in the JIRA issue with a link to the pull request so we know the code is ready to be reviewed.

The review process

The airavata community will need to review your pull request before it is merged. If we are slow to respond, feel free to also email the dev mailing list: dev@airavata.apache.org.

During the review process you may be asked to make some changes to your submission. While working through feedback, it can be beneficial to create new commits so the incremental change is obvious. This can also lead to a complex set of commits, and having an atomic change per commit is preferred in the end. Use your best judgement and work with your reviewer as to when you should revise a commit or create a new one.

A pull request is considered ready to be merged once it gets at lease one +1 from a reviewer. Once all the changes have been completed and the pull request is accepted, it must be rebased to the latest upstream version. It is also a good idea to squash all the commits into a single one, since this will allow us to generate a clean patch and merge it properly.

Accepting Contributions

Developers with Airavata Commit access should read Accepting Contribtions on steps to accept the contributed code